A long time ago you discussed how you wanted to...

edmund-blake-nelson asked:

A long time ago you discussed how you wanted to tell your patients "“So, do you prefer mildly condescending platitudes, or medications with a bunch of side effects?" Does there exist a credible list of such "mildly condescending platitudes. I am the type of person who probably misses on quite a few of those, yet often when I search for such advice I come up with stuff that is obviously BS; which makes me question the whole source. I thank you for your time.

Some of my favorite mildly condescending cliches. I try to be careful when I use these, because they can really come of as “you are a total idiot who has never considered the obvious thing”, but every so often I find someone who in fact hasn’t considered them and doing the obvious thing totally solves their problem:

1. Get enough sleep
2. Don’t work yourself too hard / stay out of stressful situations
3. If you’re really stressed out, try doing breathing exercises
4. …or going for a walk to clear your head
5. Fake being well until you stop having to fake it; eg if you’re depressed, try to get out of the house
6. Have you considered quitting the job you hate / leaving the relationship you hate / not living with the family you hate?
7. If you’re anxious / insomniac, cut down on caffeine.
8. This temporary crisis in your life is temporary and you just need to hold on a little while longer until it ends
9. When you have a thought, check and see if the thought is really true
10. If you have a conflict with someone, try talking it over with them.

edmund-blake-nelson

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Anonymous asked:

Hey since it seems like you've been getting some hate I just wanted to say that I've been reading your blog and stuff for a couple years, and stuff you write is often interesting, funny, entertaining, or educational, but is always written with empathy and care for the ways what you say might affect others. Thank you, and I hope you never lose that.

Thanks, that’s helpful.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Have you found sufficiently satisfying answers to the ultimate questions at the intersection of cosmology and philosophy, like "why is there something rather than nothing?" or "why do laws of physics exist"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis is the only thing I’ve ever seen that makes sense.

EDIT: Maybe I should have ended with “…about this topic”, but I like the implication as written.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Not enough space to quote but are paras 5-11 here accurate (delete spaces, won't let me send url): thearchdruidreport-archive .200605.xyz /2017/03/ the-magic-lantern-show. html Seems 'big if true'

For people who don’t want to check the link: it claims that there used to be a lot of “hysterical neuroses” where physically healthy people became paralyzed, and now these rarely happen.

It attributes this to Sigmund Freud, who said that one of the most common of these neuroses, “glove anaesthesia”, was caused by guilt over excessive masturbation. Nobody wanted to sound like an excessive masturbator, so people stopped “generating” hysterical neuroses.

It’s true that there used to be lots of hysterical neuroses, and now there are fewer (though I’ve seen the occasional case).

The explanation I always heard was that the invention of the neurological exam (eg hitting your knee with a hammer to see what happens) was near-perfectly able to distinguish between hysterical vs. real paralysis. Since nobody could get away with hysterical paralysis anymore, they stopped doing it, and switched to other complaints like headaches or vague stomach pain.

Supposedly, none of this is conscious. It’s just a question of how the body expresses mental unhappiness. I agree that even the less lurid neuro-exam explanation raises a lot of weird questions. And there are definitely cultural differences in mental illness.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Since a young age I've valued romance very much, but I lack sexual feelings towards my sex (not to mention physical danger of that in my country), and the opposite sex are unfeeling uncaring horrible and will screw me over at the earliest opportunity. I know you do not regard death as something innately negative: should I just kill myself already?

Let me guess: whenever you bring this up to other people, they look shocked and say “What? The opposite sex isn’t unfeeling / uncaring / horrible / likely to screw you over! How did you come to believe such terrible things?” and then you dismiss them as corrupted by society and regurgitating platitudes.

(the exact way this conversation goes depends on your gender, but either way, I’m sure it happens)

I don’t think either one of you is wrong. My own experience as a guy is that I both know mostly really good, honest, caring, honorable guys, and that I’ve dated mostly really good, honest, caring, honorable women (and XX nonbinaries). I swear that I’m not just failing to think this through or trying to regurgitate platitudes. On the other hand, I do know people who have really and truly had the opposite experience.

So the question is - why do different people have such different experiences?

My guess is that you’re doing one of the following:

1. Biasedly interpreting social cues from opposite-sex people in a hostile way.

2. Inadvertently exhibiting behavior that causes opposite-sex people to react in a hostile way.

3. Selecting for only the worst members of the opposite sex.

I know people of both sexes for whom each of these three is true. In particular, number 3 is a big deal. There are some people, male and female, who seem to have some kind of compulsion to seek out terrible people to date. They don’t realize this. They don’t want this. But they unfailing spot the worst person in the bar and end up in a relationship with them.

If I were you, I would try some experiments to figure out which of these three is true. For example, if you have a same-sex friend who also knows the opposite-sex people who have betrayed/hurt you, etc, ask if that same-sex friend agrees the opposite-sex person has been a bad person in their interactions with them. If no, that’s some evidence for 1 or 2; if yes, that’s some evidence for 3.

If you have a same-sex friend who always has good experiences with the opposite sex, ask them to set you up on a date with the sort of person they would like. If you don’t find them sexy at all, ignore that feeling and keep going. See if this person is also terrible and wants to hurt you. If not, consider the possibility that you only find terrible/hurtful people sexy and unintentionally seek them out.

Also, it sounds like you’re in some country where homosexuality isn’t tolerated. It also sounds like you’ve absorbed a lot of Western norms (cf. being on Tumblr, reading my blog). Are you sure that your differences with your country’s people aren’t just cultural? Have you tried dating Westerners? Is it better?

If none of that works, there are lots of fun things in life other than sex - like drugs, and rock n’ roll. I still think it would be a shame to kill yourself over this problem.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

It's pretty easy to look back on the piles of bleached skulls and conclude that communism is an evil, intellectually worthless ideology. But the first communists did not have that kind of evidence. Do you think they made a reasonable mistake and cannot be held culpable for what happened?

I think I would have been a Communist in 1910.

I’m not sure what you have to add to 1910-me to make me not a Communist. Extra IQ wouldn’t work - there were a lot of Communist geniuses. The best rationality training available at the time wouldn’t work - it tended to produce a progressive atheism that segued easily into Communism. Some sort of Burkean conservativism would’ve been the only hope, but I’m not sure how you could have convinced me of Burkean conservativism.

My impression is most of the people who criticized Communism in 1910 did it for the wrong reasons - because it was godless, because peasants were gross, because we needed to protect the imperial glory of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It’s amazing how many people you could find even into the 1950s saying things like “Sure, Communism will produce limitless prosperity for all…but it’s anti-American!”

If we can blame the Communists for anything, it’s for not being careful enough. I think a very, very wise person in 1910 might be able to look at eg the French Revolution and say something like “this looks promising, but based on past history we should add in a lot of escape valves and ironclad rights and stuff”. And I still don’t think this would have worked - actual Communism would have steamrolled over whatever escape valves you put in.

Overall I’m very gloomy at whether rationality alone could have prevented Communism, and I’m gloomy that whatever the next Communism is, we’ll have to go through it before we learn our lesson.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

I've read and reread the series of meditations from your old blog many times, because they're brilliant, but they skip from 3-5, and this has really driven me crazy. I assume that there was a 4th meditation that was deleted for some good reason, but could you kindly give some general sketch of what it was?

Marginal Revolution linked to it, and I wasn’t ready for that at that stage of my blogging career, so I deleted it.

It was something about how difficult it was for two people who were attracted to each other but didn’t have common knowledge to tell each other. The part that interested a lot of people was a model of a Russian spy, who was supposed to meet up with their handler, and *pretty sure* who it was, but worried they had the wrong person and were going to out themselves. Meanwhile, the handler wanted to out himself to the real spy, but didn’t want to say “Yes, I am a Russian spy handler” to random people. I imagined a clever spy would try some gradually intensifying set of signals, like:

SPY: Hey, do you know any good borscht places around here?
HANDLER: Oh, yes, I love borscht!
SPY: The best borscht comes from Moscow, I would say. Have you ever been?
HANDLER: Oh yes, I love Moscow, I spend a lot of my time on [street KGB headquarters are on]
SPY: Okay, I’m a spy
HANDLER: Okay, I’m your handler

…and that this was basically what flirting is.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Advice for becoming a successful autodidact? I feel like after work every day I'm too tired to learn and on days off I only want to relax and do the life-maintenance tasks I skip on work days. Is there a way to escape this cycle?

I think that really depends on what you want.

If you mean “sit down and teach yourself German”, then I’ve never been any good at that kind of thing and you should probably ask someone else.

If you mean “end up with lots of knowledge about lots of random things without ever being sure how you got it”, then I’m afraid this is really dependent on interest. A lot of the things I know, I learned when I should have been other stuff, or was too bored to do anything but read Wikipedia, or something like that.

Given the way you frame your problem, it sounds like one option is to find something you’re interested enough to do even when you’re tired. Nobody ever said “I’m too tired after work to play Civilization IV, alas, I guess I can’t do it.”

Another option might be to change your schedule. I used to nap for a couple of hours after work, then wake up, do some stuff, and sleep a few more hours before getting up in the morning. I know other people’s bodies are different and they can’t manage that, but for me it seemed to really work.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

why do you think the male-female things/people interest dichotomy doesn't extend to mathematics?

I don’t know and find it really confusing.

The best I can do is say that for some reason, computers count as literal things, but since math is abstract it doesn’t? I realize that totally torpedoes my attempt to link it to systematizing/empathizing, though.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Do you eat bacon?

I can’t decide whether to feel guilty about it for being unhealthy, for being nonvegetarian, or for being treyf. So sometimes while all the parts of my superego are fighting over that, my id can sneak in and grab a piece before they notice.

Anonymous

nuclearspaceheater

Source: thetransintransgenic

worldlypositions

Over the Atlantic

I am told that knowing about the planning fallacy and trying to account for it does not avert the planning fallacy. I wonder if this is because people are dutifully trying to shift their expectation of something going wrong appropriately close to 100%, when the actual expectation should be closer to 5000%. Nonetheless, I caught my plane and am successfully moving at six hundred miles per hour above the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast between the ease of this and the ease of moving at half a mile per hour from my bed to the bathroom at the start of this journey feels like a good example of something.

And while a few things have gone wrong, probably more things have gone especially right. Moving my things in a giant suitcase turns out to be much less terrible than lugging them around on my back in a bulging ‘personal item’, as is my usual strategy. Especially because someone else is in charge of the giant suitcase now.

There was no queue to check in, security was easy, my gate was right outside it, separated only by a shop I wanted to go to. I was fairly anxious at the start of the plane trip, but then a nice flight attendant gave me multiple tiny bottles of wine to drink. He also kindly informed me that my airplane food, while dubious in ways, was not dangerous and that I should just eat it, which is something I usually miss traveling alone.

This plane has a respectable selection of movies and TV. As well as a less respectable selection, from which I have mostly selected. I watched ‘Why him?’, a movie portraying a Silicon Valley billionaire boyfriends as a sort of horrifying other species, unable to communicate with or understand normal humans, but ultimately friendly. While I’m not opposed to laughing at the oddities of Silicon Valley boyfriends, I thought it was interesting that for this to work they had to basically make the guy seem really clueless and stupid in ways. Even though most such people are pretty smart. I wonder if the writers are not that familiar with such people, so don’t know how to justify a smart person behaving in laughable ways. But maybe it is just funnier if you exaggerate it to the point that it is impossible to justify.

I watched a TV show about finding strangers who look identical to each other, and getting them together to see how alike they are. If it was a real test roughly as presented, it was very striking. Of the seven pairs they had on the show, one pair were both homosexual night club workers with the same hair style, and another pair had the same first and last names. They mentioned a lot of other similarities between pairs, but those seemed more like what you might come up with if you took two random people and looked for things in common. Or things that would tend to make you either look similar or find each other. However the two coincidences I mention seem surprising. I suppose the show probably just had a lot of such people to choose from, and took the most interestingly similar ones. Which they didn’t explicitly claim to not be doing. But that seems naughty.

I downloaded Instapaper, and have been finding it a surprisingly appealing way to read things (surprising because nothing is an appealing way to read things). Possibly it just seemed appealing because I filled it with things from the archives of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist.

I listened to half of a podcast about Alexander Hamilton, who seems to be now permanently classed in my mind as ‘topic of derpy fictional amusement’ rather than ‘history it would be virtuous to know about’. Hopefully I can gradually expand this circle so that the agricultural revolution seems like particularly obscure backstory to Hamilton, nonetheless fascinating to a fan.

The podcast said that Hamilton the musical is about the conflict between being shiny and political, and being straightforward and doing the work you think is important, or something like that. As represented by Burr and Hamilton. I observe that Burr and Hamilton also seem to represent a conflict between waiting for it and grabbing opportunity immediately. Which makes me wonder if those axes are related.

For instance, I wonder if waiting a lot is in general a better strategy in social spheres than it is in object-level ones, because there is often more to be permanently lost. Like, if you say a dumb thing people can bring it up forever, whereas from the perspective of object level inquiry, you can change your mind about it in five minutes when you decide that it is wrong. I’m not sure if this holds for actions more serious than saying things—if you run your company into the ground or burn down your house it may be hard to undo, but you can recover socially (eventually).

That podcast was destroyed randomly, and can’t be recovered because accessing the internet on this plane seems to require the internet. So instead I listened to a third of a podcast about people killing other people. I think some of them were the Assyrians. Some of their killing was especially not nice. That’s all I know, because I only listened to it for like an hour, and apparently Assyrians are not yet catalogued under ‘obscure Hamilton backstory’ yet.

atlantic ocean actual travel

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Over the Atlantic